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Re: Entertainment Earth Clone Trooper 4-pack exclusives

Boy, talk about the same wave length. I would love to see Hasbro come out with a troop builder line after the last movies dies down, like "Troops"! They could really concentrate on Army Building with variations, it could sweep across all 6 movies, everything from Stormtroopers to Battle Droids to Clones!!!

I would like to see it done very much like the current, OCT/POTC lines with the black background and silver bars, but go for the Canadian "starburst" background!

That would be sweet. But Hasbro would have to remember to pack the figures evenly in the cases. ie one case of "dirty Sandtroopers" would have 3 Gray, 3 Orange, 3 Black and 3 White Pauldrons.

The rank of Corporal is a bit different. The Corporal is an NCO, but they are in the grade of E-4 (ie Jr. Enlisted). In some cases a Specialist (E-4) recieves a latteral promotion to Corporal. This is done for different reasons. Now keep in mind that this is an Army thing, and rank varies by Branch of Service ie Marine Corp, Air Force, Navy and Coast Guard.

But there are a lot of gray ares not covered in the basic structure. There are 9 "grades" of enlisted soldier and 9 "grades" of officers. Lucas appears to have melded all the enlisted into 2 groups: White Clones which represent Jr. enlisted (E-4 and below) Green Clones which represent all NCO's Sergeant through Command Sergeant Major. Then he has 3 colors for the officers Blue for Lieutenants, Red of Captains and Yellow for Commanders...which isn't really a rank in the Army, it's more of a title. A Captain can in fact be a "Company Commander" yet Generals are often Commanders of Brigades, Divisions, Corps, and the Army itself. Like I said, lots of gray areas...

The NCO support chain is designed to mirror the officer chain. The enlisted (Jr. enlisted as well as NCO's) are the ones on the ground, checking ID's, digging trenches, setting up camp, etc. The Officers are the policy makes that say where it all happens, etc. Battlefield commanders assign missions and taskings to work towards the ultimate goal. The NCO support chain is designed to provide officers with limited experience the benefit of their many years of real world experience.

Is this all confusing enough for you?

In any event you will generally see a disproportionatly large number of enlisted to officers on the "battlefield". But T has the rigft idea:

1 Commander / OOM-9 (yellow markings in SW)

4 Captains (red markings in SW)

8 Lieuteniants (blue markings in SW)

16 Sergeants (green markings in SW)

Seems just about right. I would add about 50 basic White Clones to the number...ie "grunts".

However, I still like the idea of even numbers of colored Clones, Sandtroopers, etc. It just makes finding the variations simpler. Besides, I don't really look at these and say "Hmmm, is this really accurate, would you have X number of Black Pauldron Sandtroopers with X number of Gray Pauldrons?" I just like seeing all the different colors represented.

Re: Entertainment Earth Clone Trooper 4-pack exclusives

If you go by the Naval Officers names (I'm a Navy veteran, BTW), then the names make compete sense.

A Lieutenant can be either an O-2 or O-3 (Lieutenant Junior Grade (Lt. J.G. for short) and Lieutenant, respectively in the Navy OR 2nd Lieutenant O-1 or 1st Lieutenant O-2 in the Army) Basically the Lieutenant is the lowest grade Officer for the clones.
A Captain is an O-3 (in the Army but in the Navy is an O-6, in this case Lucas is using the Army ranking)
A Commander is an O-5 or equivalent to a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army.

To give an example of what a clone army might look like starting with ONE Yellow Clone Commander, (and for the sake of simplicity and Lucas taking liberties with rank) we can come up with a rank structure for clones as such:

Commander (Yellow Clone)-1 having 4 captains under him (BATTALION)
Captains (Red Clone)-4 having 2 Lieutenants under each of them (COMPANY)
Lieutenants (Blue Clone)-8 having 2-4 Sergeants under each of them (weíll make it 2 for this example though it could easily be 4) (PLATOON)
Sergeants (Green Clone)-16 who have 6-8 White Clones under each of them (For this exercise we will say 8) (SQUAD)
White Clones-128

for a total of 157 clones of varying rank making up a complete complement of clones.

This does not include Biker Clones or ARC Troopers.

Biker Clones would be a company unto themselves. The command structure would be the same but the numbers would be less in each section.

The ARC troopers have a wholly different command structure. With the Comics only showing the Blue Clones and the Animated show showing Red, Blue and White, we can only guess where their rank falls. Though Iíve heard that the colors are or equal rank to the regular clones. (Though since these are of a higher mind capacity, Iíd think it would be an insult if you were a White ARC to be compared to a typical white grunt clone)

Alright, that was quite nerdy...or was it. It was an excercise in military ranking.

Also, those numbers don't include Administration Staff, Cooks, medical personel and other Ancillary Staff, but that's not needed for this excercise. (I don't see there being a need for a Secretarial Clone any time soon. ha ha)